Eyal Vilner: ‘It’s All Jazz & All Danceable’

News, From the Magazine, Eyal Vilner Big Band

By Allen Morrison I Oct. 15, 2024

“Nobody in jazz school is telling you to learn how to dance,” says bandleader Eyal Vilner (center). But he thinks maybe they should.
(Photo: Michelle Gevint)

When he was a music student in New York back in 2007, hanging out at Smalls every night, Eyal Vilner, much like his classmates at the New School, was in love with bebop and hard-bop — music not usually associated with dancing. How he came to lead one of the more notable swing dance orchestras in the world is a story about the fundamental connection between jazz and physical movement, whether it’s just tapping your foot or doing the Lindy Hop.

His deeply swinging music, much of it original, is not just danceable — it’s eminently listenable.

His love for swing started much earlier, in Tel Aviv, where he was a jazz-obsessed teenager attending the city’s High School for the Arts. “Bird was my main inspiration,” he reminisced recently. “And Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins … that was the first stuff I loved and wanted to play.” He was trying to understand what it really meant to swing. His jazz history teacher gave him a CD of Duke Ellington’s Newport 1958 album. “He said, ‘Go listen to that, and you’ll get it.’”

Another incident with a different teacher proved just as indelible. “We were having a lesson in a basement in a suburb of Tel Aviv, and he said, ‘Listen, you gotta feel the music!’ And he made me stand up, and he’s like, ‘We gotta move our bodies and dance.’” Teacher and student moved their bodies — danced, if you will — to Duke’s “Cotton Tail.”

These days, dancing is essential to Vilner’s art. Now 39, he leads the Eyal Vilner Big Band in 10-piece and 17-piece iterations, each populated by top talent and rising stars on the New York jazz scene. His orchestras are highly favored by dance and Lindy Hop festivals around the world, including the International Lindy Hop Championships in Harlem. He is also the co-creator and musical director of a jazz-dance/theater production called Swing Out, which has played extended engagements at the Joyce Theater and has toured the U.S.

While he loves vintage tunes, he is not content to simply reproduce danceable jazz from the middle of the 20th century. Vilner, who plays alto saxophone, clarinet and flute, started to discover his voice in his 20s by writing for smaller ensembles before organizing, and writing originals for, his first big band in 2008. “I like to say the pencil is one of my instruments,” he said.

His seventh album, Swingin’ Uptown, recorded with the tentet, includes six Vilner originals. The band features established and up-and-coming musicians like Brandon Lee on trumpet, Julieta Eugenio on tenor saxophone, Jon Thomas on piano, Ron Wilkins on trombone and Imani Rousselle on vocals. “We recorded it after playing 22 shows in that month,” Vilner said. “Everything was done in one or two takes, all in the same room together. And we invited dancers to come into the studio and dance with us as we were recording.”

Vilner rejects the concept of “retro” jazz. “I’m not one of those cats who’s trying to relive the roaring ’20s or the ’30s. We’re not trying to recreate something but, rather, to be as close as possible to the source — the art form of swing dancing and Lindy Hopping — to create something new that is informed and influenced by it. To me, the album is a new take on what danceable jazz can be.”

The dance community has reacted enthusiastically to Vilner’s style of swing, and the Vilner band, with its more modern leanings and original material, has become a fan favorite. The swing dance community has changed in the last few decades. Where once it was mostly classic Lindy Hop with the man leading and the woman following, these days there are more same-sex couples, and dancers feel freer to improvise. Today’s swing dancers desire a broader musical palette than just classic big-band music.

There is also more interaction between the dancers and the band. Vilner is known to come down from the stage and interact with particular dancers in a call-and-response manner.

Vilner cites tracks from the new album to demonstrate the band’s diversity of styles. “We have hard-bop, like ‘I Love The Rhythm In A Riff’; that’s a bebop tune by Billy Eckstine. ‘Coffee Bean Stomp Jubilee’ [an original] is New Orleans-style. It’s interesting to see how the different sub-styles within jazz all can have a direct connection to the dance; it doesn’t need to be only from the ’30’s big-band era to be danceable. It’s all jazz and all danceable.”

He cites the need to play with “kavanah” — a Hebrew word that means sincere feeling from the heart, something honest and soulful. “I feel that when I play for dancing — and also when I’m not playing for dancing, but the music is informed by dancing.”

For Vilner, as an “outsider” from the Middle East coming to jazz and Black American culture, discovering the concept of Lindy Hop, a dance born in Harlem, “was as much of an educational experience as learning the other parts of jazz — transcribing the solos, reading the history and learning the blues and bebop.” He began to appreciate that “the experience of feeling the music in your body is much different than hearing it in your head and playing it. … Nobody in jazz school is telling you to learn how to dance.”

Vilner corrected that deficit in his education by taking dance lessons himself. As a result, he started to understand more about the connection between jazz and movement.

“Learning the connection makes you feel some responsibility about what you play and how you play it,” he said. “It touches them, inspires them. You’re physically moving people. What could be better than that?” DB